Goiania
Brazil's first planned city, site of the world's worst non-nuclear radiological disaster, now an agribusiness hub where growth outran the plan that created it.
In 1987, scavengers in Goiania broke open an abandoned radiotherapy machine and found glowing blue powder inside. They distributed it to family and friends. The Goiania incident became the world's worst radiological contamination event outside a nuclear facility — 249 people contaminated, four dead, 85 homes demolished, and 3,500 cubic metres of radioactive waste generated from a single canister of caesium-137.
The incident reveals the city's deeper pattern: explosive growth outrunning institutional capacity. Goiania was founded in 1933 as a planned capital for Goias state, designed by urbanist Attilio Correa Lima on Art Deco principles. It was Brazil's first fully planned city, intended to modernise the interior cerrado region. The plan worked too well. Goiania grew from zero to 1.5 million in under 90 years, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in Latin America.
In 1987, scavengers broke open an abandoned radiotherapy machine and distributed glowing blue caesium-137 powder as gifts — the world's worst radiological disaster outside a nuclear facility.
Goias state is now Brazil's agricultural heartland, producing soy, corn, and cattle for export. The cerrado biome — Brazil's tropical savanna — has lost over 50% of its native vegetation to agricultural conversion, much of it feeding the commodity flows that pass through Goiania's processing and logistics infrastructure.
The agribusiness wealth is real: Goias has among Brazil's highest GDP growth rates, and Goiania functions as the financial and service hub for an agricultural frontier that extends north toward the Amazon. The city's pharmaceutical and food processing sectors have grown alongside the farming boom, creating a diversified but ultimately agriculture-dependent economy.
The planned city that was supposed to bring order to the interior instead became a demonstration of what happens when growth overwhelms planning. Goiania's original Art Deco grid has been swallowed by informal expansion, traffic congestion is severe, and the cerrado that the city was meant to develop is disappearing. The caesium incident remains the metaphor: institutions that fail to maintain containment eventually release consequences no one anticipated.